makumaro.net

Coffee At Every Corner

Stopped using my knockbox to get rid of coffee pucks due to the warm weather. The coffee pucks (as a very fertile environment) become mouldy pretty quickly, so I resorted to just knocking them out on my tamping mat. I then started stacking them up to make space for more coffee pucks when I made coffee.

Getting the consistent 55 to 60ml from a double shot these days. I don’t drink nearly enough to practise my shots consistently to improve my skills. 500gm of beans can last me a good two weeks, serving just myself and Vyanne plus the occasional guest.

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Was at St Ali yesterday evening, seeing a latte art sort of smackdown. The barista community in Melbourne seems pretty close knit, and I recognised a few faces in the crowd as they were from the cafes I frequent. It was a pretty chill environment, and you start hearing people tossing technical coffee jargon around.

The amount of control you need to pour a triple rosetta into a cup requires surgical precision, meaning no jittery hands. The cup was poured by a Japanese barista from St Ali called Toshi, and he’s been there for quite a while now.

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Heh, this is definitely not my average rate of posting. It’s just that I’ve been tweaking my blog lately, so I’m more inclined to write stuff these days. A few more things to fix up and I’ll probably not touch it again until after my CPA paper.

On Organising Photos

This it the last photo I’m posting from the Great Ocean Road trip. Went to take a look at the Triplet Falls. This is one of the rare times I bring my tripod out and actually use it. Slapped on a polariser to reduce some of the light going in while stopping down to the minimum aperture of f/22. Even used ISO100 on my D300 to get as slow a shutter speed as possible. Managed to get a 2 second exposure out of it. All this just to get the silky look of water from the waterfalls

Really should invest in a 77mm ND filter for these sorts of shots, but I hardly get to see waterfalls anyway.

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Been busy editing the website when I’m free, just to keep the momentum going while I’m still keen and excited about doing it. Putting a little more effort into deciphering code, so I’ve tweaked the archives to display the listings as I prefer it.

As I want continuity, sometime down the road I’d like to move linking photos to flickr. As convenient as it is, I don’t really want to pay $25USD annually to have that option. This plus the fact that Yahoo might wind up flickr one day and migrating the whole lot of photos if it does go down will be a giant undertaking (currently over a thousand photos on flickr).

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I recall from the early days of my D70 while I was reading a Malaysian photography magazine about how one of the photographers organised his photo folders. He created folders with the year, month and day plus a short description and he imported the shoots into each based on that. I picked up the date format easily but took a little while to get meaningful descriptions for each folder.

This was way back in 2004 so I’ve been organising photos that way ever since, which is very helpful for me to find photos as I just need to recall roughly when I went on a trip or did some activity and it doesn’t take me more than a minute to locate the folder and image files.

As my collection of photos get larger (35,000 photos as of this writing?), it gets more difficult to track. I take less photos and delete images with more fervour these days. Quality over quantity they say.

I’m also getting into the habit of tagging my photos with useful metadata for easy search in the future. I get the gist of how it is useful and how I should be tagging the photos so that it makes sense for me when I do a search. I recommend watching the LL guide to Asset Management video from Luminous Landscape if you want a quick and simple method of organising your own photos. I haven’t finished watching all the videos in the tutorial but what I have gleaned so far from it is helping me sort through my files more efficiently.

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After a couple of days of rain, the weather is more tolerable now. Time to go for a quick run.

A Few More Tweaks

The lighthouse at Cape Otway. Heh, managed to wait for no people to be around and took a snapshot of the lighthouse. Might have overdone the vignette in post processing but I kind of like it that way. This is a picture of symmetry where the sea level is straight and the lighthouse sits right in the middle, with the path to the lighthouse drawing your eye towards it.

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Added a few more tweaks to the web design. Tweaked the navigation bar so that one can wander around the site and still get back to the main page (have always ignored to put a home link as the usual idea has been to use the header logo as the link back to the main page). Added CSS3 text shadows to the post titles, and made some subtle colour changes all around. Heh, didn’t mention Internet Explorer support as they aren’t really standards compliant so I’m not going to bother. I guess most of the visitors to this blog will be using a more sophisticated browser to begin with.

Want to go back to linking websites that I frequent. Not sure what format I’d put it in but the web has so many useful areas to provide information on various topics and I think sharing is the best way to let others know what I tend to read.

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Seem to have lost track of time. Tweaking the code for this website is a good exercise in forgetting about other things and it can keep me occupied for quite some time. There’s a few things I could continue doing when I have time, including getting the search box back into the layout, as well as finding a more elegant solution to the archives.

I set about being minimalistic about the current theme, and rather than tear it up and start fresh, it’s easier for me to slowly evolve it and I’m liking it more and more each time I tweak it, which is better suited to the time I have now that I’m working, compared to when I had all the time in the world as a student. Heh, more to come soon.